What would he say about nuclear-armed U.S. naval fleets on and under every one of the earth's oceans, and our total nuclear arsenal of close to ten thousand thermonuclear weapons of mass destruction which could end most human life on the planet in 30 minutes?
What would he say about the tragic irony of the first African-American U.S. president presiding over, if not controlling, this menacing global corporate-military empire?
Here is what he did say, presciently, in "Beyond Vietnam -- A Time to Break Silence": "A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death."
Of course, in the supposedly "most religious" Western nation addicted to extreme materialism and too distracted by celebrity gossip, sports, and "reality" TV to care about the true state of their own declining country, let alone the planet, "spiritual death" is the very last thing on the minds of most U.S. consumers. Then again, we should never be so foolish as to confuse religion with spirituality, let alone consumerism with citizenship.
Not content, however, to only delineate our country's bloody history and its violent flaws, King spoke about what we need to do in words that are timeless:
A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, "This is not just." It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, "This is not just." The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just.
A true revolution of values will lay hand on the world order and say of war, "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.
America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing except a tragic death wish to prevent us from reordering our priorities so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.
With these words, King became a true revolutionary himself, and, most likely, signed his own death warrant exactly one year to the day of that speech. These words, especially, challenge us to question capitalism, the very economic ideology and system which so many tout as not only the prerequisite for freedom and democracy, but as the basis of "The American Dream": ""an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."
Imagine what he would say today, as we suffer with more than 17% total real unemployment (much, much higher among Hispanic and African-American males), more than six applicants for every job, increasing home foreclosures, growing numbers of hungry and homeless, a widening wealth gap between the top 5% and the rest of the U.S. greater than ever, and 45,000 dying each year due to lack of affordable health care in the wealthiest nation on earth, while Wall Street bankers get record-high bonuses, war profiteers see increasing stock prices, and climate change becomes life-threatening climate chaos for our children and grandchildren as well as for so many non-human species which share our precious planet.
King would most likely be at the forefront of a people's movement to restructure our entire culture from a predatory, thing-oriented one to one of compassion, as he said. His reaction to his own Nobel Peace Prize is indicative of who he was and what he would be doing, and challenging us to do, today: "I cannot forget that the Nobel Prize for Peace was also a commission -- a commission to work harder than I had ever worked before for "the brotherhood of man.' "
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